Suriyan Panlay RACISM IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature Series Editors Kerry   Mallan Faculty of Education Children and Youth Research Ctr Kelvin Grove ,   Queensland ,   Australia Clare   Bradford School of Communication and Creative Art Deakin University Burwood ,   Victoria ,   Australia Aim of the series This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on chil- dren’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contem- porary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range of children’s texts – literature, fi lm and multimedia. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14930 Suriyan   P anlay Racism in Contemporary African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature Suriyan   Panlay Thammasat University Bangkok , Thailand Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature ISBN 978-3-319-42892-5 ISBN 978-3-319-42893-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956116 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover image © RooM the Agency / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Mum and Dad A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is a well-known, almost culturally untranslatable word in Thai called ‘namjai’, literally referring to ‘the pouring of the heart’, typically used to describe an act of kindness one generously extends to another. Upon the completion of this book, I am forever grateful for the namjai of the following kind individuals: Dr Christine Wilkie-Stibbs from Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick, for her words of encourage- ment and insightful criticisms; Professor John McRae of the University of Nottingham and Professor Jonothan Neelands of the University of Warwick for their comments on the fi nal draft; Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis from Palgrave Macmillan New York for their interest in the project and their kind assistance throughout the publication process; my best friend Gary Rutthaporn Malayaphun and the two girls—Culi and Kaopote—for being there every step of the way. My Anthony—I am glad I have found you. For Dad—thank you for instilling in all of us the importance of learning. For Mum (3 June 1929—4 September 2014)—thank you for the sto- ries, all those years ago, under the night skies of southern Thailand. I will carry them with me. Always. vii C ONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Internalised Racism and Critical Race Theory 19 3 Wounded 57 4 Tongue-Tied 93 5 Displaced 1 25 6 Triumphed 157 7 Conclusion 1 87 Index 203 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 “ I CRYING FOR ME WHO NO ONE NEVER HOLD BEFORE” Claireece Precious Jones or “Precious”, as she is better known in the novel, is an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned protagonist of Sapphire’s P ush (1 996 ). Precious loathes herself for being “so stupid, so ugly, worth nuf- fi n” (p. 34) and, having been made part of a racialised landscape where an image of the self is crooked, misrepresented, she is led to believe that her existence is nothing but a “vampire sucking the system’s blood. Ugly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, fi nded a job for” (p. 31). In her mind’s eye, however, she is a “beautiful chile like white chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers ... a blue-eye skinny chile whose hair is long braids, long long braids” (p. 64). Upon encountering a stranger’s kindness, Precious cries—“I crying for me who no one never hold before” (p. 18). In Sharon G. Flake’s The Skin I’m In ( 1998 ), another young adult text explored in this book, 13-year-old Maleeka Madison is perpetually haunted by her own dark skin and African features: “Somebody said I had hair so nappy I needed a rake to comb it” (p. 13). This feeling of inferior- ity, unfortunately, has landed her at an inner-city school instead of a better school across town as she is threatened by “them girls [who] looked like they come out of a magazine. Long, straight hair. Skin the color of potato © The Author(s) 2016 1 S. Panlay, Racism in Contemporary African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2_1 2 S. PANLAY chips and cashews and Mary Jane candies. No Almond Joy-colored girls like me” (p. 39). Young Maleeka is also envious of her friend Malcolm at her school for having “a white dad and a black momma” (p. 17), with “long, straight hair [and] skin the color of a butterscotch milkshake” (p. 17). In her very own words, Malcolm is “lucky” simply because he “looks more like his dad than his mom” (p. 17). When their self-perceptions are constantly doubted and ultimately reduced to nothingness—u gly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, fi nded a job for , and when physically morphing themselves into ‘blue-eyed’ skinny children with ‘long, straight hair’ is apparently their only alternative available, Precious and Maleeka open up an old, hidden wound that, for centuries, has haunted American blacks, a wound that has often been treated, unfortunately, as their own individual psychological fl aws, leaving them, as a result, in a perpetual state of self-c ondemnation. It is the representation of this kind of experience of inferiority and its subsequent psychological devastation portrayed in both fi ctional and nonfi ctional works that has become the provenance and premise of this book. Whether it is taken directly from lived reality as the one undergone by young Claudette Colvin in Phillip Hoose’s C laudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice ( 2009 ), a National Book Award winner for young peo- ple’s literature—“Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at Booker T. Washington” (p. 22)—or channelled through fi ctional char- acters as portrayed by Precious and Maleeka, the paralleled experience is equally distressing. This book is thus set up to explore, through its focus children’s and young adult (C&YA) texts, such racially silent/silenced experiences and to u n-silence them. Both fi ctional and nonfi ctional representations cited above have com- pellingly captured the life of young African American girls caught in a racial tide and harmed by self-infl icted psychological mutilations. From a theoretical perspective, this type of racially and psychologically devastating experience is an example of what has been formally identifi ed as inter- nalised racism or internalised racial oppression or psychological slavery or a much-criticised term—racial self-hatred. As a theme, internalised rac- ism has always been explored or treated, though ‘peripherally’, by African American authors of both C&YA and adult literature. Toni Morrison’s fi rst novel, T he Bluest Eye (1 999 ), an adult book focalised through a child narrator, is arguably the fi rst full-length novel that puts this racial issue at the centre, depicting how internalised white beauty standards or